For a while now, we’ve noticed that caps are attached to all plastic bottles you buy these days. This has caused quite a bit of irritation — it’s easier to spill and harder to drink directly from the bottle since the cap pushes against your nose.
The caps are attached to prevent them from ending up in nature. It’s essentially an environmental measure meant to help EU citizens avoid littering.
The relevant EU directive can be found here — feel free to click around and read:
Directive (EU) 2019/904 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 5 June 2019 on the reduction of the impact of certain plastic products on the environment (OJ L 155, 12.6.2019, p. 1).
Note the dry language, the references to other directives you need to read to understand it fully, and the explanation that new laws are published in some EU journal no one’s ever heard of.
Those who are more familiar with the topic of waste and pollution know that the majority of the world’s plastic is discarded outside Europe — in countries like India, China, and Indonesia, for example. In the EU, we have strict recycling regulations. In a country like Sweden, very little is simply thrown away — most things are either recycled or incinerated under controlled conditions.
Perhaps the attached cap is about tightening the rules even more, ensuring not a single cap ends up in the wrong place. To make littering completely impossible?
Well, one could still toss the entire bottle, cap and all. A person indifferent to nature would likely throw the whole thing, not just the cap.
In a civilized society, a simple ban on littering should suffice. It should be illegal to litter with caps, bottles, or anything else that doesn’t belong in nature.
The attached caps seem to stem from some kind of technocratic ideology — partly because they don’t trust citizens and partly from the hope that this idea might spread to other countries outside the EU, where littering is a bigger issue.
What we do know is that this bottle cap law comes from the top down — it wasn’t driven by citizens. We, the people, haven’t seen bottle caps scattered everywhere in nature, then petitioned politicians for action and eventually got our will through. No — this is a political and bureaucratic creation, one in a long line of peculiar EU proposals.
All power is derived from the people, and proposals should rise from the bottom up. If, for example, people feel unsafe on the streets, they should present the problem to elected officials, who then take action. This is the proper order of things.
But that’s not how it works. Ideas are born in Brussels by people with little connection to reality and then imposed on us citizens. The authorities don’t work with us — they work above us. They know better, and we’re the recipients of their ideas; we are the subjects.
A silly bottle cap isn’t the end of the world, of course. But I bring it up as an example because it’s quite telling. One day, without prior information or explanation, you’re faced with a cap poking into your nose. And all bottles have it — it’s not the invention of a single manufacturer. No, it’s universal. And it’s done to protect nature, to stop the cap from ending up in the ocean, despite you having sorted your waste diligently for 25 years.
A clever bureaucrat has worked hard to make life better for you, me, and nature — the fact that it’s disconnected from reality and that far more serious issues deserve attention is completely ignored.
